Mule ESB vs OpenESB comparison

Salesforce and OpenESB are both solutions in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) category. Salesforce is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.0, while OpenESB is ranked #13. Salesforce holds a 18.0% mindshare in E, compared to OpenESB’s 1.7% mindshare. Additionally, 87% of Salesforce users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of OpenESB users who would recommend it.

Mule ESB

Read 52 Mule ESB reviews

4,072 Views
3,054 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

OpenESB

Read 4 OpenESB reviews

382 Views
382 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Mule ESB

OpenESB

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 3, 2025

Mule ESB and OpenESB are integration platforms competing in the enterprise environment. Mule ESB has the upper hand with its comprehensive features and robust customer support, while OpenESB offers advantages in simplicity and quick deployment.

Features: Mule ESB provides robust connectivity with seamless integration to cloud services, APIs, and complex applications. It supports various protocols and features sophisticated data mapping and transformation capabilities. OpenESB emphasizes lightweight integration with efficient business process automation and service orchestration, offering a modular architecture suitable for smaller deployments without compromising on flexibility.

Ease Of Deployment and Customer Service: Mule ESB offers extensive documentation and a supportive community which enhances customer service and facilitates a smoother deployment process. Its rich ecosystem aids quick setup but can introduce complexity. OpenESB's simpler architecture allows for faster initial deployment in basic scenarios and demands more technical knowledge for complex setups. Mule ESB provides better customer support compared to OpenESB.

Pricing and ROI: Mule ESB involves higher upfront costs with licensing and subscription models but offers long-term ROI through scalable features. OpenESB, being open-source, is cost-effective with lower initial costs appealing to budget-conscious buyers, yet might incur hidden maintenance costs. Mule ESB's larger initial investment is often justified by its scalability, whereas OpenESB offers rapid ROI for basic needs.

To learn more, read our detailed Mule ESB vs. OpenESB Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Mule ESB vs. OpenESB

September 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Mule ESB

Ranking in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

2nd

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

OpenESB

Ranking in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

13th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) category, the mindshare of Mule ESB is 18.0%, down from 22.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenESB is 1.7%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Mule ESB	18.0%
OpenESB	1.7%
Other	80.3%

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

Featured Reviews

Maharsh-Kapadia

Enterprise Integration Architect at Tata Consultancy

Transforms enterprise integration with comprehensive platform and excellent support

The best features of this solution are that everything we get into a single platform, whether it's integration, API, or data modeling; everything is available in one platform. It's a hybrid, including cloud and on-premise solutions with good connectivity and good connectors. From the benefits of using Mule ESB, we could reduce the manual tasks to 50% in one to two years. The cost is still something we are trying to make lower because we see some advantages when we move from point-to-point integration to API-led connectivity. We have seen a lot of reusable assets, so the cost is reduced. Ultimately, we want to see how it's transformed into business revenue; that's what we are still looking into.

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PaulPerez

Integration Architect at Pymma consulting

Easily define choreography and orchestration with this process-oriented solution

We provide contracted services for our customers that include coordinating with providers and implementing the solution. A current project includes using the solution to deploy 200 microservices. The process-oriented solution allows you to define choreography and orchestration. This feature…

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"For complex cases, we employ the SSLi engine, whereas for simpler ones like healthcare or response data, such as EDI 270 or 271. We prefer to use an external XRT engine instead of handling it within the ESB for ease of management."

"Scalability and load balancing."

"The most valuable feature of Mule ESB is data transformation, i.e. our interacting with different systems and orchestrating for our business needs."

"What Mule provides out-of-box is a sufficient product."

"The connectivity the solution provides is excellent. There are often too many systems that we have to integrate and this helps with that."

"We can use Java expressions anywhere in the flow."

"This tool has exceptional API management and integration connectors in addition to multiple out of the box connectors."

"The most valuable feature is that it's programmer-friendly, so it's very easy to develop APIs."

More Mule ESB pros

"The core is very stable."

"OpenESB pushes the organization to clearly define service boundaries and interfaces. So it motives the business and the development teams to clearly define their business services and processes they want to implement. OpenESB supports fine and coarse-grain granularity for the services and supports top-down and bottom-up approaches for the services, processes definition, and composition."

"One of the most valuable features is being able to implement business processes while keeping track of the design from BPMN to a BPEL Implementation."

"The process-oriented solution allows you to define choreography and orchestration."

Cons

"I cannot say that installation with Kubernetes needs to be improved to be less tricky, but more information is needed from MuleSoft. They do not help much with Kubernetes, so we should have a person who is well-versed in Kubernetes to handle this."

"From my perspective, Mule ESB is lightweight, but it can be improved when it comes to the agility of the system."

"Lacking some connectors that could be included."

"Improvements could be made in performance."

"The current version will not be supported for much longer."

"In an upcoming release, I would like to see more additional concept for exception handling, batch processing, and increased integration with other application."

"The payment system needs improvement."

"The solution's setup needs to be a bit more straightforward and its support needs to respond faster."

More Mule ESB cons

"The documentation of the product must be improved. It could be tricky to find the right documentation on a topic since the documentation is spread in many places. I advise the new joiner to contact the community to get entry points and additional documentation. Tutorial and Video must be present to take up the product."

"Regarding its management, a web console being able to synchronize distributed instances would be great."

"Cloud deployment is weak and needs to be improved."

"The documentation needs to be better."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Most of the challenges that I had with this solution were for smaller customers. There is not a good licensing model or pricing model. It is more expensive than other solutions, and that's the downside of MuleSoft. I had to be creative to be able to sell it to the business, but we did. This is something they have to work on because for large companies, it's affordable, but for small and medium businesses, it's very hard to sell."

"You will not get any support from Mule ESB's team for the tool's community edition...You can get support with the licensed version of Mule ESB."

"This product is cheaper than some offered by other vendors, although there is a problem because you have to pay for some third-party adapters."

"I think the price is very high. If you use TIBCO BW, the license is for the CPU usage, then the IPS, and support. I also think the license for the product is a one-time expense."

"The solution is expensive."

"Plan your licensing model (cloud or on-premises or hybrid) that will allow seamless integration with new partners."

"The various features and components for this solution are no longer free."

"The price of the Mule ESB commercial version is expensive. However, they have a free community version."

More Mule ESB pricing and cost advice

"The cost for the prediction instrument is high because it is charged per instances based on prediction, but the rest of the solution is free."

"There are two versions. The first is the community version, which is free and contains the last part of the feature, but if you want to get the Enterprise version, you'll have to pay €60,000 which covers support and two instances on production."

"The Community Edition is a full product you can use in production, it does not have limitations like other alternatives."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

16%

Hospitality Company

11%

Logistics Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	23
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	36

No data available

Questions from the Community

Migration from IBM Integration Bus to Mulesoft ESB for a large enterprise tech services company

I was previously part of the Oracle SOA/OSB development team. In my current capacity I architected solutions using MuleSoft Anypoint Platform on cloud / on-premises and hybrid modes and on PCE/RTF ...

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IBM Integration Bus vs Mule ESB - which to choose?

Our team ran a comparison of IBM’s Integration Bus vs. Mule ESB in order to determine what sort of ESB software was the best fit for our organization. Ultimately we decided to choose IBM Integratio...

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What do you like most about Mule ESB?

The solution's drag-and-drop interface and data viewer helped us quite a lot.

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Comparisons

IBM Integration Bus vs Mule ESB

Compared 22% of the time

Oracle Service Bus vs Mule ESB

Compared 12% of the time

IBM B2B Integrator vs Mule ESB

Compared 9% of the time

webMethods.io vs Mule ESB

Compared 9% of the time

Oracle SOA Suite vs Mule ESB

Compared 2% of the time

More Mule ESB Competitors

WSO2 Enterprise Integrator vs OpenESB

Compared 32% of the time

Oracle Service Bus vs OpenESB

Compared 22% of the time

More OpenESB Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Mule ESB

August 2025

Download Mule ESB product report

Buyer's Guide

OpenESB

August 2025

Download OpenESB product report

Overview

For companies looking to modernize and unlock the value of existing on-premises systems and applications, an enterprise service bus (ESB) architecture serves as a critical foundation layer for SOA. When deployed as an ESB, the Mule runtime engine of Anypoint Platform combines the power of data and application integration across legacy systems and SaaS applications, with a seamless path to the other capabilities of Anypoint Platform and the full power of API-led connectivity.

Salesforce

OpenESB is a Java-based open-source enterprise service bus. It can be used as a platform for both enterprise application integration and service-oriented architecture. OpenESB allows you to integrate legacy systems, external and internal partners and new development in your Business Process.

OpenESB

Sample Customers

Ube, PacificComp, University of Witwatersrand, Justice Systems, Camelot

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Mule ESB vs. OpenESB

September 2025

Free Report: Mule ESB vs. OpenESB

Find out what your peers are saying about Mule ESB vs. OpenESB and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.

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